e can go as far
afield as to the ascetic ecstasies and agonies of medieval religion, in
_The Hermit and the Wild Woman_; or as to the horrible revenge of Duke
Ercole of Vicenza, in _The Duchess at Prayer_; or as to the murder and
witchcraft of seventeenth-century Brittany, in _Kerfol_. _Kerfol_,
_Afterward_, and _The Lady's Maid's Bell_ are as good ghost stories as
any written in many years. _Bunner Sisters_, an observant, tender
narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes of two
shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's age of innocence.

For the most part, however, the locality and temper of Mrs. Wharton's
briefer stories are not so remote as these from the center of her
particular world, wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the
crucial mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars are
likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate ideal is in
conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or reputation, as when in
_The Descent of Man_ an eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into
the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in _The Verdict_
a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius
and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never
do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all
Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority
of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course
coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across the
boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it suffers tragic
changes in the objects of its desire.

What opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs.
Wharton prefers to represent? Either its behavior must be furtive and
hypocritical or else it must incur social disaster. Here again Mrs.
Wharton will not be partizan. If in one story--such as _The Long
Run_--she seems to imply that there is no ignominy like that of failing
love when it comes, yet in another--such as _Souls Belated_--she sets
forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when individuals take
love into their own hands and defy society. Not love for itself but love
as the most frequent and most personal of all the passions which bring
the community into clashes with its members--this is the subject of Mrs.
Wharton's curiosity and study. Her only positive conclusions about it,
as reflected in her stories, seem to be t